The Long Night of the Radiant Star by Jeffe Kennedy

Author:Jeffe Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy
Publisher: Brightlynx Publishing
Published: 2022-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

When the dragon arrived, it caused quite a stir. Not that dragons don’t always cause excitement—with their enormous size and awe-inspiring ferocity that made vulnerable humans gut-wateringly nervous around even dragon-friends—but ever since the slumbering dragon had vacated the bowels of the quiescent volcano beneath the castle, dragons had been scarce around Windroven. The plain truth was that the bulk of people in the original twelve kingdoms still remembered the Great War and the ravages of the Tala, adding to the tales over time with dramatic embroidering, until those magical exploits attained near-mythological status.

In the environs of Castle Windroven, the phenomenon was even worse, as many people vividly remembered Rayfe’s siege of the castle and the surrounding countryside. Within the royal family, bygones were—mostly—bygones over that tumultuous time, but everyone in the region had lost a warrior in those pitched battles. Those glimpses of shapeshifters and collisions with unsettling magic had only added to the previous mythology from the Great War, and lingered to that day.

People generally preferred not to be reminded that Stella was both a shapeshifter and a sorceress, bearing the stamp and the mark of the Tala, so she kept her shapeshifting private, as did her siblings with the ability. It occurred to her that this hiding of her true self had only added to her feelings of being oppressed during her stay.

She ran up the stairs to the ramparts to greet their dragon guest, and prevent any trouble. When it had been spotted, the massive creature had been only a silhouette against the winter sky—identifiable as dragon, but not which color. Her empathy didn’t reach quite far enough, either, at least not enough to differentiate a specific dragon from another.

It could be Kiraka, bringing someone from Nahanau, or Zynda winging over from Annfwn. Privately, Stella hoped for a miracle, that it would be Gen in dragon form, flying all the way from her new home in the Isles of Remus—even though Gen had written that she and King Isyn would be unlikely to attend the wedding, as it would be too difficult to get away again so early in Isyn’s rule.

Stella reached the heights, heart bursting from a near-lethal combination of hope, dread, and anticipation, not to mention running up so many stairs. Perched as it was on the quiescent volcano, with the castle forming essentially the entire top of the craggy peak, there was no place else for the dragon to land but the roof—other than the snowy fields inconveniently far below. She made it up there before the dragon came within firing distance of the ballistae. The guards had been ordered not to shoot, but some were veterans of the bad old days and had touchy trigger fingers when it came to enormous monsters.

Ascertaining that all was well and none of the guards seemed inclined to disobey the stand-down order, Stella shaded her eyes, discerning the deeper sapphire blue of the dragon against the paler winter sky—at the same moment that Zynda spoke in her mind.

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